drawings

So Flickr Pro users now have access to stats, also announced on the flickr blog on the amounts of traffic they get, and where that traffic comes from. One of the first things I saw was a post on Valleywag that uses an old image from my Amiga Pictures set, here’s another old link to my
amiga set, and another:

Most of my images are licensed under a Creative Commons license, and it’s fun to see where these are used. For example, the Wikipedia article “Book” includes a photo of mine of Kali Kirk at the San Diego City College Learning Resource Center, which was taken for the technical writing class Leah and I took at City College in San Diego several years ago. I mentioned it in a blog post back in 2004. And actually, that image was one that I recieved a note from someone from The Pirate Party about using in a poster back in 2006. I never heard anything more about that though. This is the image:

Two silly ones pulled in from starwars.yahoo.com, recent: 1 and 2:

Here’s a usage of this image from a post in Hebrew. Interesting, but I wonder what the article is saying? I tried Google Translate and Babelfish and don’t see any machine Hebrew to English translators. What’s up with Hebrew? Is it harder to machine translate than, say Arabic or Chinese or Korean or Japanese? Or is it simply a less popular language?

More great work from flickr. I’m impressed. We use it to print family photos and get prints at Target, excellent service. Unrelated, but I thought I’d mention it since I’m all warm and fuzzy and enthusiastic about the service today.

Did I really go a day without blogging? For shame! No, not really.

It’s Halloween, though I don’t have any special visuals to offer you today—I’ve been far too busy lately. But I do have many tasty linky treats to offer. Really!

Remember, Color Me Badd—famous for the song I Want To Sex You Up—they were a vocal band, sort of a boy band, from the 1980s? I just read that Kevin Thornton, one of the members of the group, went through an exorcism to remove demons from him. He is now a devout Christian. All this according to Undercover Black Man. You can listen to his exorcism—here’s the sound file from the radio show where it happens. It’s pretty freaky. Perfect for Halloween!

Harry Potter Postmodern Textual Controversy! I suppose everyone has heard now that J.K. Rowling said that part of how to understand Dumbledore is that he’s gay. Now, it’s not explicit in the books, but the author aught to know about his or her creations, right? I expect that they know what they were thinking. Here are two articles, from very different sources taking completely different viewpoints: over on FindLaw, a legal affairs website, Michael Dore has an article called Harry Potter and the Framers’ Intent which posits basically that what is on the page is on the page—the way the legal system works. If there’s no explicit memory conjured by Dumbledore, if there’s no signaling of his homosexuality in the text, it’s not there. One might argue it is too subtle, but if it’s so ambiguous, it can hardly be said to be there, yes? How subtle does something have to be before it’s not there? On the other hand, science fiction author John Scalzi takes the completely opposite position: What Authors Know About Their Characters. I think this is an interesting question. In sci-fi fandom there’s a concept of “canon” works. So in Star Wars, one typically considers only the movies to be canon—novelizations, comic books, tv shows, and other items are not canon, so are not accepted into some discussions of the work. Here’s more from Scalzi, talking about an article from the New York Times on the same subject:

if Rowling had as part of Dumbledore’s background that he was straight, or entirely asexual, his character would be different and his actions and responses and backstory would be different. He would be different. He wouldn’t be the Dumbledore he is today (or was, because he’s dead, but even so). Rothstein seems to be falling into the trap of assuming that everything that goes into a character shows up on the page. This is entirely wrong. What shows up on the page is the public life of the character, so to speak: The things about a character that a writer chooses to let you know about them. The private life of a character exists off the page, and takes place between the writer and the character.

I think in the end it is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s hard to ignore what a creator says about a work. For example, Blade Runner, one of my favorite movies—in different versions it is clear/unclear/subtle/unsubtle whether Deckard is a replicant. I tend to skew toward interpretations where Deckard is not a replicant, though in interviews Ridley Scott (the director, and for our purposes a primary author of a movie) says with no hedging that he’s a replicant.

So what do you think of this? Can you think of other “controversial” statements other creators have made about their creations?

Self loathing ghost writers! Speaking of authorial intent, did you know that Leslie McFarlane hated ghostwriting the Hardy Boys? In fact one of his books seems to be brimming with double entendres designed to denigrate his works. The 10 Zen Monkeys blog has a post about it—How gay were the Hardy Boys?—I actually see McFarlane as a rather sad figure, reading this. I hope never to create artistic works I despise.

Meanwhile, in the funny papers funnies – go read Cat and Girl today. I laughed!

Casual games are apparently a $2.25 Billion with a B dollar market. You know, I know there’s a lot of room for growth in casual games, but numbers like this will make you crazy I think. It’s not like you’re going to make a game and win all that market. Remember Pets.com—they were going to win the huge market for petfood. Same concept. But casual games are a great industry and a very exciting one right now. Okay, not really very Halloween-ish.

I’ll leave you with blasts from the past:

In about 1981 or 1982 I stole a Halloween mask—then in 2005 I remembered it. And actually, I had forgotten that I did that until today. I guess one does not like to think of the wrongs one has committed. I don’t shoplift anymore.

In 1987 I made great killer poster for Halloween:

Also in ‘87: I designed some pumpkins:

In 1991 I won a costume contest as the joker:

In 2001, the year I started this blog, I was musing about costumes and not wearing one.

In 2003 I made this header.

In 2003 I was only talking about the fires in San Diego.

In 2005 I made a guts cake for Alex.

And last year I mused about Festium Omnium Sanctorum

Happy Halloween everyone!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Ferreteer repurposes my self portrait based on a suggestion from Tom Bickle.

Ferreteer has made me laugh out loud before with his PhotoShop shenanigans.

It’s a lovely morning. Feeling great. my back was hurting yesterday, but it’s much improved today. Today’s a pool day, I believe.

Though I don’t have the proof, this one is even better than the last one.

Well, that last one was a terrible resemblance, as pointed out by Tom Bickle.

This one is rather better, I think. This actually looks like my professor. I even have some proof of that.

I used to draw a lot in his class, psychology is a great subject for drawings. Drawings to illustrate my notes, or just to doodle. After all, I think my major at the time was Fine Art, well, that was my declared major, inasmuch as a Community College student can have a major.

I enjoyed that class. I liked to make arguments in that class. The Prof argued that we overused the word “love” so much as to negate its meaning. We “love” the symphony, we “love” our car, etc. I argued that love still had meaning as a word, because from context we can tell what people mean by what they say when they say they love something.

Well, I love being able to share my meandering and rambling thoughts on this blog.

Can you tell that that’s different from when I say that I love Leah?

Oh, I’m getting pretty deep now.

It’s striking to me that a class I took for a few months 17 years ago has left such vivid memories.

And here I am disgorging them in a medium that did not exist when I had the memories originally.

Little more than a scribble. The mustache is an afterthought. Not a great likeness.

I can tell the year because of the mustache, and the lab coat.

Maybe it’s not obvious to you it’s a lab coat, but it’s sure obvious to me.

I like this one a lot. So minimal. So few strokes, but it works as a whole. I like it.

Updates: we were given the great gift of a gym membership and last night we used it for the first time. Leah and Dev and Alex to a Tai Chi class, and I went to the pool and swam laps. Great stuff. I’m sore all over, which sounds like exactly the right thing. I’m very happy with that outcome. I have a lot of extra fat on me which impinges on my ability to do what I want to do.

Granted, I can lift stuff, and move stuff, and get around, and even walk a lot, but it’s hard on my body, my joints. If I were a car, I would be in need of a tune up. So I think that’s what this is.

I’m toying with making it a goal to swim laps every day. The place is open pretty late during the week, so we’ll see.

This morning is pretty, though it looks like it’ll be a hot day. We’ll see.

In other news, if you’re in Simi Valley and play racquetball, and are a middling player, give me a shout. Wanna partner?

In yet other news, I have failed to see both War of the Worlds and Fantastic Four in the theaters. We did see March of the Penguins, which was great, but it vexes me to not have seen WotW and FF on big screens.

In yet other other news, yes, the comments system for the site generates errors right now. It’ll take your comment, but it’s ugly. Rest assured, I’ll get your comment. If you resubmit, it’ll come in twice. Yes that stinks.

Okay, gotta get going. Leah’s off to work. I’ve done some email and blogging, and it’s time to begin the workday.

One of my pals, Binary Wolf, and I, spoke for more than an hour (was it two?) yesterday—about all topics. Quite a wonderful conversation between two cable-modem havin’ guys.

Turns out he was looking for a logo, and right there on the audio call, I whipped up an illustration that now graces his Pringles Cantenna page. For a one off drawing I did and scanned in a few minutes, it was very gratifying. He described what he wanted, and I whipped out this:

This was a little raw, so I refined it and scanned that and got this:

Which in turn had some cantenna details wrong, so in Photoshop I tweaked and messed, and even added a genuine image of a Pringles can, about and the final result is this:

I dig it a lot. I got mad skillz yo.

Granted, it’s not my best drawing ever, but for someone who has been, in this space, mythologizing his drawing skills of the past but providing precious little in the way of new drawings, it was a terrific exercise. I’m drawing!

So go visit Do-It-Yourself Wi-Fi Antenna Update and of course and most especially, the Pringles Cantenna page.

This was for the graphic design class in 1988 that I did so poorly, as I recounted here. The idea was to have some rich textures to show off. This one was done with india ink, washes, and black and white colored pencils. I still quite like this texture.

Something like this makes me think of Creative Commons licenses and how I am not really using them. Every time I look at them I am not quite sure how to license my work. I really don’t want to give all my stuff the same license, and doing it on a case by case basis seems too hard to me.

I guess metadata is hard.

On a downbeat note, it seems that flickr will transition all their users to yahoo membership accounts in 2006. I hate that idea. I lost my “artlung” account on yahoo.com several years ago and I can’t log in because I gave them a fake DOB way back in 1997 or so. If I can’t have “artlung” as a username and you don’t provide me with a mechanism to retrieve it or even talk to a human being about what it might make to do that, then your service is stupid.

More on the conversion here: Top 5. Do I have to log in via Yahoo!?

Please note that we will be migrating all independent Flickr accounts to Yahoo!’s network in 2006. At that time, if you have not done so already, you will be asked to create a Yahoo! ID (or link your account to your Yahoo! ID if you already have one) in order to continue using your account. We’ll provide further details about the merge as the date approaches.

In the post “One Less Password” on flickr blog, Stewart Butterfield indicated nothing of the sort.

I appreciate the service flickr provides, and I don’t want to migrate away from it, but I will if they make me do this. I’m preparing for this eventuality.

Part of my fandom of Japanese culture was learning, which is to say trying to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets. So while these vehicles are interesting and well rendered, what I find more interesting is my own careful choice of names.

Jek is the overarching name of the zaibatsu I invented for these pieces. Think of it like Mitsubishi or Sony. Then, the actual vehicles are named Platypus and Amenbo. Amenbo is Japanese for “pond-skater,” apparently from some language reference on page 191. While Platypus is from the english word, and has been broken up into it’s syllables: pa-ra-te-pu-se. These phonemes, or maybe they’re syllables, then get looked up to their katakana equivalents.

Today I’m back to work, and things are pretty good.

There’s lots to say but no time to say it.

Hope you’re all having a great day.